Boku no Hero Academia 7 – Episode 21 Review (END)

「個性”無き戦い」 (Kosei” Naki Tatakai)
“Battle Without a Quirk”

Another season of Boku no Hero Academia is in the books. An odd time for a finale, two weeks into the fall season – but 21 is an odd number of episodes (and not just literally). The announcement of an eighth – and final – season coinciding with the finale seems like it should have been completely unsurprising. This is one of the most popular franchises in manga history, after all (steadily creeping up the top 20). But given Jump’s recent history of screwing over its kaijuu franchises – and their fans – by completing them with movies, one could certainly take nothing for granted.

As such the announcement was a welcome relief. The final season will air in 2025 (I’ll be surprised if it’s not Spring) and should easily fit into a single cour. It will be controversial but that’s the norm with HeroAca. It seems odd to say that such a massively popular series is underrated, but it sure seems like this one deserves a lot more respect than it gets. The truth is that the negative side of the fanbase is smaller than the positive, it’s just that they’re a lot louder. For my money this is the best of the WSJ battle shounen giants in recent decades (Hunter X Hunter being sort of beyond categorization, in every way). And I’m not sure it’s particularly close.

This “Final War” arc has been surprisingly light on the protagonist and deuteragonist. In point of fact neither of them have appeared for more than a cameo in many weeks. With so many threads to tie up this isn’t surprising, and the names who’ve dominated recent episodes – the Todoroki family, Toga Himiko, Ochaco et al – are certainly among the most important supporting characters in the story. The stage is being set, that’s surely no spoiler at this point. But the undercard has at times threatened to eclipse the main event (Episode 19 was doubtless among the very finest in the entire series).

Horikoshi never short-changes his villains, that’s for certain. In many battle series they’re more interesting than the heroes, and while in BnHA’s case it’s more like a draw, I do think a case can be made that the story is really more about the villains than the heroes. That is, the flaws in this hero society – pretty much hollow at its core – are the essence of the entire plot. And it’s the likes of Stain, Twice (alas, Jin-kun, you were a bro), Dabi, and Himiko that expose that in all its ugliness. Not to get too poetic, but in a way I think many characters in Boku no Hero Academia are branded as villains because they make the good guys see a world they would rather pretend doesn’t exist.

That Ochaco reached Toga in the end is undeniable. The ugly truth is she found kinship and – yes – love in the League of Villains when polite society had none for her. Like Deku, Ochaco never dehumanizes her enemies. She saw the essential unhappiness that made Himiko do the things she did. She can’t be forgiven for them – she became a killer of innocents, and the moral verdict on that is clear-cut. She was almost a killer of Uraraka, too – considering how much blood she’d lost running around fighting after being stabbed, her race was probably just about run. But Toga chose to make her final stand saving someone she finally realized really cared about her, whether she deserved it or not.

This final act being effectively a photo-negative use of her quirk was wonderfully poetic in its own right. I think having just said her final goodbye to Jin – who she indisputably loved more than anyone else – Himiko felt the pull of fate tugging on her. Make what you will of her apologizing to Ochaco in the end. For me, it doesn’t change anything – she’s still a killer in many ways beyond redemption. But in this story being a villain and a victim are not mutually exclusive. And if nothing else I think it’s obvious that apology was sincere. She had absolutely no reason not to be in that moment.

As that curtain falls, it rises on All For One Jr. and All Might. All Might takes to the field for what seems likely to be his last stand. He has no quirk, just a power suit and Hercules, but he faces down AFO because there’s no one else left to do it. Armored All Might is a greatest hits record of everyone that made an impact n Toshinori’s life – his predecessors with One For All. The students in Class 1-A. None of these quirks are as powerful as the real deal, but in this particular showdown they’re better in one way – there’s nothing there for All For One to steal.

With Manami Aiba streaming it out to the world, All Might makes his last stand. He swears to Tsukauchi-kun that he’s never taken the field in a fight he expected to lose, but I think that’s a technicality here. Winning really means delaying AFO long enough for Deku to do what he needs to do. All Might knows this enemy better than anyone – knows his patterns, and know how to push his buttons. His gear is very good gear, but this is a world of quirks – tech is meant as augmentation, not replacement. Toshinori is nobody’s fool, and he knows the truth of the matter. But he is the man he is, and that knowledge is not going to stop him from doing everything he possibly can.

The question hanging over Season 7 of HeroAca for me is whether it will wind up on the year-end Top 10 list. It has a perfect record so far, and no other franchise comes close to its history in the LiA rankings. The stars have aligned perfectly – the one season it might have missed out, Season 5, aired in the pandemic-ravaged year of 2021 (and still barely snuck in). S7 was clearly better, but 2024 is clearly a better anime year than 2021. The short answer is I have no idea as I haven’t even started the process yet. I’ll be objective – sentiment won’t guide my decision. But I do know that this series has been a big part of my anime life, and knowing we’re so close to the end gets me quite emotional about it. Boku no Hero Academia is one of the all-time greats, and history will treat it as such.

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